Salem Political Snark

Indivisible scorecard ranks Elizabeth Warren #1

Great idea, Indivisible folks.

You've fashioned a clear, easy to understand, transparent scorecard for the Democratic presidential contenders that rates them on three criteria:

Policy Platform: Indivisibles want a candidate who is committed to enacting bold, popular, progressive policies across a range of areas, including immigration, climate, economic justice, health care, and other critical policy areas.

Day-One Democracy Agenda: None of the policy reforms we want to see in 2021 are possible without a democracy that responds to the people. Indivisibles want a candidate who is committed first and foremost to ambitious reforms to save our democracy.

Building Grassroots Power: Indivisibles know that national change won’t come from any one leader - it will take a movement. Indivisibles want a candidate who is committed to building grassroots power, as demonstrated by their fundraising, campaign strategy and management, support for other progressive candidates, and their engagement with Indivisible groups.

Who comes out on top? Elizabeth Warren.

 

I like Warren a lot, so I was pleased to see this result. However, my wife favors Buttigieg, and I can understand why she does. Buttigieg strikes us as the most compelling speaker, since what he says seems to come from the heart, not from canned campaign lines.

However, along with most progressives I look upon the Democratic presidential candidates through the lens of who could stand on a debate stage with Trump and kick his butt (metaphorically... though I'd enjoy seeing a literal butt-kicking).

To me, Warren would fare best going toe-to-toe with Trump. She's composed, fearless, and has an in-depth understanding of every topic that might come up.

Of course, it could be argued that the candidates who do worse on the Indivisible scorecard would fare better in the general election, since their moderation would appeal to a broader spectrum of voters.

I can resonate with that argument, since more than anything else, I want a Democratic candidate who will win, even if their policy positions aren't perfectly progressive.

On days that my psyche is in that frame of mind, I look upon Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar with considerable fondness. They'd stand a good chance of doing well in the mid-west "rust belt" states that are key to winning the 2020 election.

Indivisible has a good rejoinder to my a moderate would be best theory, though. This is a screenshot from their Rubric document.

 

In 300 words, Katyal makes a great argument for Trump's impeachment

Today I started reading Neal Katyal's compelling little book, Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.

Katyal has personally argued thirty-nine Supreme Court cases. He's a law professor at Georgetown University. He's taught an impeachment course there twenty times.

And he's an excellent writer. Below is how his book starts out. In a bit less than 300 words, Katyal nails the case for impeaching Trump. The rest of the book is icing on the impeachment cake.

So if you're in favor of impeachment and someone questions why this makes sense, say you'd like to read them a brief argument by a noted impeachment expert.

Once I read the following, I was hooked on Katyal's book. Not that I needed much convincing about the need for impeachment. I just loved how clearly and succinctly Katyal laid out the case for impeaching Trump. Enjoy...

Imagine if it had worked.

Imagine if our president had leveraged his role as commander in chief to convince a foreign power to open an investigation into his political opponent.

Imagine if the president's rival lost the primary because news broke that he was under investigation.

Imagine if that meant the president faced a weaker candidate in November 2020 -- and won reelection as a result.

Imagine if our president owed his victory to a foreign power and we never found out.

Imagine how much leverage the leaders of that country would have on our foreign policy decisions.

Imagine how easily they could blackmail our commander in chief.

Imagine what our president would do next, knowing he could subvert our democracy without paying a price.

Now, imagine if, eventually, we did find out. But it was too late -- because he had already won.

Imagine if our president abused the power vested in him to win -- and we knew it.

Imagine what that would do to our faith in elections, to our trust in government, to our belief that we live in a democracy.

If President Trump's efforts to coerce Ukraine into interfering with our democracy had stayed a secret until the 2020 election -- if a brave whistleblower hadn't risked his career, and his safety, to speak out -- we would have fundamentally, perhaps irrevocably, lost faith in the legitimacy of our republic.

This is why we have no choice but to impeach and remove President Trump: because he wielded the powers of the presidency to serve himself instead of the people he represents; because he was willing to undermine our democracy to help his prospects of reelection; and because he has stated repeatedly and unapologetically, that he would do it again.

Supporters of Trump need to be treated as co-creators of his unethical world

Having watched a good share of the two weeks of televised open hearings in the House impeachment inquiry, I'm well-qualified to draw some reasoned conclusions about our national politics.

(1) Trump is the worst president in our nation's history. Not just recent history. Our entire history. 
(2) Trump doesn't care about what's best for our country. He only cares about what's best for himself.
(3) Congressional Republicans have sold out their ethical values in exchange for Trump not tweeting bad stuff about them.
(4) Anyone who still supports Trump is guilty of aiding and abetting his unethical behavior.

To me, that fourth point is the most disturbing.

I expect Trump and his Washington D.C. cronies to act like the self-serving jerks that they are. What surprises me is how relatively steady his support has been, even as Trump's personal and policy failings have become more apparent.

A Washington Post story this month contained charts of Trump's approval rating over time among all adults, Democrats, independents, and Republicans.

The story says:

Overall, Trump’s approval hasn’t changed all that much on our polling since he’s been president. He has never been above 42 percent approval and never under 36 percent. Right now, he’s at 38 percent approval, on the lower side of things.

Well, Trump's approval should be on the lower side of things.

Extremely solid evidence shows that our country's Liar-in-Chief used his position to bolster his re-election chances by seeking the involvement of a foreign power in a made-up investigation of a chief opponent, Joe Biden, holding vital military assistance to Ukraine hostage for 55 days until a whistle-blower revealed Trump's sordid scheme.

Here's Trump's approval rating among Republicans.

Yes, it's good to see that now only about 75% of Republicans approve of Trump, down from almost 90% at previous points in his presidency. It's just hard to understand how three out of four Republicans can approve of someone who puts his own personal interest above the national interest.

And equally bad is Trump's incessant and willful lying. We've never had a president with such a disregard for the truth. When Trump is caught in a lie, he feels no shame. Instead, he doubles down, repeating the lie.

Today Trump spouted at least 18 false claims in a 53 minute Fox & Friends interview. Probably more, since CNN says they are still fact-checking what he said. Here's a few examples.

CrowdStrike

Trump said that Democrats gave a computer server that was hacked in 2016 to "a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian."

Facts First: The cybersecurity company that investigated the hack, CrowdStrike, is a publicly traded American company co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, an American citizen who was born in Russia, not Ukraine. Regardless, such firms do not typically take possession of physical servers to conduct their analysis.

 

Asked if he is sure the Democrats gave the server to Ukraine, Trump did not cite any specific evidence. He said, "That's what the word is."

 

The accuracy of the whistleblower

Trump said that the whistleblower complaint about his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky "bore no relationship to my call."

Facts First: The whistleblower's account of the call has largely been proven accurate.

In fact, the rough transcript released by Trump himself showed that the whistleblower's three primary allegations about the call were correct or very close to correct.

 

Marie Yovanovitch and Trump's photo

Trump claimed about Yovanovitch: "This ambassador that everybody says is so wonderful, she wouldn't hang my picture in the embassy. ... She's in charge of the embassy. She wouldn't hang it. It took like a year and a half, or two years, for her to get the picture up."

Facts First: There is no evidence that Yovanovitch refused to hang Trump's photo. It took the Trump administration more than nine months after his inauguration to distribute an official photo of Trump to government buildings such as embassies, CNBC reported in 2017. More than seven months into the term, the White House told The Washington Post that Trump had not yet sat for the photo.

 

A State Department official who has recently served in Kiev said Yovanovitch never sought to prevent Trump's photo from being put up at the embassy. The official said the photo did not arrive until late 2017.

 

Obama's aid to Ukraine

Trump said President Barack Obama sent only "pillows and sheets" in aid to Ukraine, adding, "He wouldn't send anything else."

Facts First: Obama did refuse to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, but he didn't send mere pillows and sheets; he sent counter-mortar radars, drones, armored Humvees and night vision devices, among other things.

 

Who is paying for Trump's tariffs on China

Trump blamed "the media" for trying to convince people that Americans are paying for Trump's tariffs on China.

Facts First: A bevy of economic studies have found that Americans are bearing the overwhelming majority of the tariff costs, and Americans make the actual tariff payments.

 

Thus it is impossible to believe anything that comes out of Trump's mouth, unless it is backed up by solid facts, which usually it isn't. This puts the United States in a horrible position, both domestically and in our foreign affairs. When the President can't be trusted, negotiations and agreements become very difficult.

Yet three out of four Republicans aren't bothered enough by Trump's failure to abide by minimal standards of ethical behavior to say they disapprove of him.

Locally, this needs to be kept in mind when voting in city and state elections next year. Salem will be electing a mayor and four city councilors. Candidates for those offices should be asked, "Do you approve of Donald Trump?" In my opinion, any candidate who says "Yes" or refuses to answer the question doesn't deserve your vote.

Today Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent wrote a piece called, "Trump's GOP defenders cannot be shamed. It's time to try this instead." This is his instead. 

It’s time to drop the posture that Trump’s defenders can be shamed into accepting what has been unearthed, or that they can be shamed into arguing from a baseline of shared democratic values, or into arguing over how to interpret a comprehensive set of shared facts.

Instead, let’s rhetorically treat Trump’s defenders as his criminal accomplices. Not just as “enablers” of Trump’s corruption but as active participants in it.

Once this is accepted, it becomes obvious why they can’t be “won over,” because they are actively engaged in keeping the corruption in question from getting fully uncovered, in the belief that they, too, benefit from it, and that they, too, lose out if it’s exposed.

...Rather, the point is we need a much more fundamental change in our underlying treatment of the moment. We need to approach it from the premise that Trump’s defenders are not “gettable” because they are accomplices in the whole scheme -- and forthrightly describe what’s happening in kind.

Sargent appeared to be speaking mainly about Trump's defenders in Congress, but his point also applies to every person in the country who continues to support the unethical swamp of the Trump presidency.

Here's how Democrats and independents view Trump. Most disapprove of him, which is some good news that hopefully will translate into Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Warren Binford talks about horror of migrant child detention center

It wasn't the cheeriest City Club talk I've ever been to, but it was one of the most important.

Warren Binford, from my seat at a City Club table

Today Warren Binford, a Willamette University law professor and children's rights expert, spoke about the history of child separations at the Mexican border and her four day visit to the Clint, Texas Border Patrol Facility.

Binford told us that the Clint facility, better termed a child warehouse, was built for about 100 adults, yet housed around 400 children. 

When asked "How have you been treated," they started to cry. Binford spoke with a 14 year old girl who was holding a tiny child. A seven year old girl was with the teenager. She wouldn't talk. The 14 year old didn't know either of the other children. Children arriving at the detention center are asked to care for other children.

Shameful? Of course. Sadly, the shame has been on display for many years, though the Trump administration has raised it to new heights. 

Binford described the lengthy history of what led up to, and followed, the Flores order -- a Supreme Court decision regarding the detention and release of unaccompanied children at the border. 

She started off her talk by asking people to read the testimony of some of those children, which had been printed on postcards, all with a different testimony, that had been left on City Club tables. I brought three cards home. 

Here's what those children said:

"At La Perrera, I was separated from mother over our objections. I was very worried and frightened because I was put with strangers." -- Maybeline, 13, El Salvador

"I let my mom know that I was getting sick. But there was nothing she could do." -- Ducesa, 12, Romania

"On the second day we were at the Hielera, they took my mother away from me and had her speak to someone on the phone, but they were speaking Spanish to her and my mother does not speak Spanish. I tried to go to her to translate for her, but they would not let me help my mom. They kept me away from her so she could not communicate our claim for asylum." -- Karla, 15, Guatemala

I was surprised to hear Binford say that these words came from a 1985 lawsuit against the Reagan administration, which alleged that children were being used as bait to get their parents. That case went on for 12 years.

Thus injustices against migrant children and their parents have been occurring in both Republican and Democratic administrations. 

However, what Binford and other advocates experienced at the Clint detention center this year must be at the Worst end of the child detention outrage scale. She said that the children there got little to eat, so were always hungry. Kool-aid was given at every meal. No milk. No fruit.

"We as a nation are in danger of losing our humanity," Binford said.

There was an outbreak of lice at the detention center. The staff told children to share the brushes and combs that had been given to them, which, of course, is a terrible way to handle a lice infestation. After a comb went missing, a staff member took away their bedding and made them sleep on a bare concrete floor.

Some of the children at Clint were being held in a windowless warehouse.

Binford visited the detention center in June 2019. A July story in the New York Times, "Hungry, Scared, and Sick: Inside the Migrant Detention Center in Clint, Tex." echoes what we heard at the City Club meeting today.

Here's how that story starts out:

CLINT, Tex. — Since the Border Patrol opened its station in Clint, Tex., in 2013, it was a fixture in this West Texas farm town. Separated from the surrounding cotton fields and cattle pastures by a razor-wire fence, the station stood on the town’s main road, near a feed store, the Good News Apostolic Church and La Indita Tortillería. Most people around Clint had little idea of what went on inside. Agents came and went in pickup trucks; buses pulled into the gates with the occasional load of children apprehended at the border, four miles south.

But inside the secretive site that is now on the front lines of the southwest border crisis, the men and women who work there were grappling with the stuff of nightmares.

Outbreaks of scabies, shingles and chickenpox were spreading among the hundreds of children and adults who were being held in cramped cells, agents said. The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing — people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work. The children cried constantly. One girl seemed likely enough to try to kill herself that the agents made her sleep on a cot in front of them, so they could watch her as they were processing new arrivals.

“It gets to a point where you start to become a robot,” said a veteran Border Patrol agent who has worked at the Clint station since it was built. He described following orders to take beds away from children to make more space in holding cells, part of a daily routine that he said had become “heartbreaking.”

Binford ended her talk by telling us what we could do to help. Here's the photo I took of her slide.

Binford also encouraged people to write op-ed opinion pieces for their local newspaper.

Of course, dumping Trump in 2020 is the best long-term strategy to help migrant children, since the Trump administration has been extremely anti-migrant, goings so far as to willfully separate children from their parents in a hope that this would discourage asylum seekers and others from entering the United States.

Dear Diary, Trump is batshit crazy. (Sorry for insult, bats)

Dear Diary, first, I realize I'm not actually writing in a diary, but I use my blogs as a kind-of-diary, because that way I can remember really important stuff that happens in my life. 

Like today, it dawned on me more than ever before that we've got an exceedingly crazy guy occupying the White House. There's not much of a chance that Donald Trump will get saner before he's removed from office. 

Still, just in case today marks the high-water mark for Trump's ascent, or descent, into Unheard Of Presidential Incompetence, I want to jot down what happened this week.

Well, mostly today, which makes this shit even weirder, since usually presidents space out their WTF!? moments rather than cramming them all together.

A few days ago, Trump announced he wants to buy Greenland. OK, not him personally. But the United States. And since he thinks he's King, rather than president, I guess he thought he could do this by his Royal Command. The Danish Prime Minister, appropriately enough, called this absurd. Which got Trump all mad, since he doesn't like women to refuse his money. Heck, if a porn star was happy to get a check from Trump, why not a Prime Minister? That's how twisted Trump's mind is.

Trump also wants to do away with birthright citizenship for people born in the United States. Sure, that's in the Constitution, and no president can change the Constitution on their own. King Trump, though, doesn't let trivial details like something being unconstitutional stand in the way of his insane ideas. Neither do psychotic people.

Getting to today, Trump ordered American companies to stop making stuff in China. If a Democratic president had dared to exert government control over free enterprise decisions, they'd be torn to shreds (metaphorically) by defenders of our capitalist system. Corporations weren't happy with this crazy talk, but they must be used to getting a Daily Dose of Insanity in their Twitter feed, if they follow Trump.

Oh, here's a good one, also from today.

Trump asked whether the leader of China or the Chair of our Federal Reserve Board, who Trump appointed, is the bigger enemy. Words fail me, dear diary. Presidents rarely overtly try to influence the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be above politics. And never has a president compared the Chair of the Federal Reserve to a dictatorial leader of a semi-communist country.

Lastly, our Genius President (I'm being ironic, dear diary) just raised tariffs on China big time, thereby escalating the trade war that is generating talk of a coming recession. Why did he do this? Because Trump is worried about a weakening economy. So naturally he does the exact wrong thing, adding fuel to the trade war fire that's weakening our economy.

I know, dear diary, it's hard to believe a president of the United States could be this egotistical, clueless, and stupid. That's why I've written this batshit crazy stuff down, since when this country starts getting back to normal after Trump loses in 2020, people  are going to begin to forget what an idiot Trump was.

Never forget! Because never again! Thanks for listening, dear diary.

A Trump recession would be utterly unsurprising

This was a nasty day on Wall Street. Also, on Main Street, for anyone who owns stocks or mutual funds. A 3% drop in a single trading session would grab one's attention under any circumstances, as an iPhone screenshot shows.

However, these aren't normal economic times. Nothing is normal, so long as Donald Trump is president. Which makes it more likely that a recession is on the horizon, given that everything Trump touches turns to shit.

Economic analysts dance around the issue of Trump's massive incompetence by saying things like "trade wars are undermining corporate confidence." A more honest statement would be, "Trump's idiotic love of tariffs, exacerbated by the fact that he doesn't even understand how tariffs work, is screwing up the world economy."

Tariffs on Chinese goods are paid by the importing companies, not by the Chinese.

So tariffs basically are taxes on Americans. This is why Trump just put off imposing more tariffs on Chinese imports until after the Christmas buying season. He and his re-election campaign don't want to be blamed for toys and other stuff that cost considerably more than they would without the Trump tariff tax.

But tariffs are just the tip of the Trump incompetence iceberg. 

He's also making a mess of foreign affairs, immigration, fiscal policy, and so much more. Example: somehow Trump and his GOP cronies have managed to orchestrate a massive increase in the federal budget deficit, even though the economy has been quite strong up to now.

Our country is on the verge of trillion dollar annual deficits. Yes, trillion. Yet the deficit hawks in the Republican party have thrown in their Tea Party towel, yawning away as Trump embraces huge debts with no reasonable way to repay them.

Which was Trump's business strategy, of course.

It's no wonder Trump refuses to make his tax returns public. Almost certainly they'd show that his reputation as a savvy businessman rests on nothing but smoke and mirrors, a fantasy that his gullible supporters eat up without questioning how they're being conned.

Corporate CEOs, by and large, have a clearer understanding of Trump's weaknesses. This is one reason a recession is more likely now. There's always been economic ups and downs. But never before has the United States been led by such an incompetent, sleazy, fact-fearing, lying president.

Thus Trump has introduced an extra risk factor into calculations of where the national and world economies are heading: himself. 

There's no rhyme or reason to Trump's decisions. He doesn't listen to experts. He doesn't have an overarching political philosophy. He doesn't have a coherent vision. He just does what his Twitter-inflamed mind urges him to do, long-term consequences be damned.

So American corporations are sitting on large amounts of cash, unwilling to spend the money because they have no idea what craziness Trump is going to unleash next. It won't be surprising if many, or most, Wall Street types endorse whoever wins the Democratic presidential nomination, given how bad Trump is for business and investment interests.

They want some assurance that the usual business/investment cycle isn't going to become a topsy-turvy Trumpian thrill ride fueled by his boundless ego and narcissism. 

Up to now Trump has gotten by on the momentum of the Obama economic recovery. But good times can't last forever when an Idiot-in-Chief inhabits the White House.

Today may mark the beginning of a Trump recession. That'd be bad for Americans. However, since a recession would markedly decrease Trump's re-election chance, in the long run it would be good for the country, since civilization as we know it wouldn't survive four more years of Trump.

Let's thank these Salem contributors to the Trump re-election campaign

We here at the world headquarters of the Salem Political Snark blog -- located, appropriately enough, in Salem, Oregon -- strongly believe in citizens being actively involved in politics.

One great way to do this is by contributing to political campaigns.

So when a fellow patriot shared with me a spreadsheet of Salem donors to President Trump's re-election campaign, information that is publicly available via the Federal Election Commission, I had two strong reactions.

(1) I'm so clueless about spreadsheets, it's damn impressive that someone was able to combine donations to the Trump Make American Great Again Committee and the Donald J. Trump for President Committee into a single file. Miraculous!

(2) I need to thank these Trump supporters in a blog post for their service to our democracy. 

I believe I succeeded in correctly copying in the names of the 77 Salem residents who have donated to the above-mentioned committees since January 1 of 2018.

If my senior citizen eyes missed a donor, consult the spreadsheet file I worked with. (Note: the aggregated amounts are in a separate tab.)
Download Salem Trump Contributors

Following is an alphabetical list of the reported Salem contributors to the Trump Make American Great Again Committee and the Donald J. Trump for President Committee. 

I've honored the top ten contributors by putting their names in red. Again, this is public information, as a recent Vox story makes clear.

That story describes how donors come to be listed in Federal Election Commission reports: "Once contributions add up to more than $200 during a two-year cycle to a certain candidate, then campaigns have to report them to the FEC, including the amount, date of receipt, and the contributor’s name, address, occupation, and employer."

ALCALA, JORGE
ANDRETTA, DEAN
ATKINSON, MARCIA
BARBIE, EDWIN
BEACH, MICHAEL
BLEVINS, ROYA
BOMAN, CHARLES D [tied #10 contributor $875]
BROUSE, GORDON
BUNDY, DEAN [#3 contributor $1,724]
CANALES, ALFONSO H. MR.
CASE, FLYNN D. MR.
CHANDLER, RONNA L MS.
CHOATE, BARBARA J MRS.
COFFEY, MARY E MS.
CUTLER, EVA MS. [#2 contributor $1,900]
DAMM, ALVIN
DONACA, RONALD L. MR.
DONACA, RONALD M. [#7 contributor $1,275]
DONACA, RONALD M. MRS. [#1 contributor $2,200] !!!!!!!!!!
DUNAGAN, PENNY
ESQUEDA, FLOYD
FARRINGTON, DAN A.
FITZWATER, PAUL
FOSTER, BILLIE S
GILLETT, KIRK
GREGORICH, FLOYD
HADLEY, SHARON
HAMMER, LINDA J. MRS.
HERHARD, CAROL
HEYN, ALFRED
HOCKETT, TERRY
HODGES, MARIS
HODGES, MIKE KELLY
HUNT, SARAH
HYDEN, CONNIE
KAUFMAN, DEAN [#6 contributor $1,384]
KEYT, LINDA
KIFLU, GABRIEL [#5 contributor $1,438]
KOCH, GRANT [#9 contributor $1,058]
KRONSTEINER, LONNIE
LATULIPPE, STEVEN
LATULIPPE, TERESA
LAY, MARY R MS.
LOWERY, SHARI
MARKS, JOHN R. MR.
MATLOCK, CARRIE
MEYER, MURIEL L. MRS.
MILLER, LOUISE
MILLER, MARY
MOFFENBIER, SHIRLEY
NORMAN, JAKE
OLIVER, PATRICIA D. MS.
POPE, ANNE
PURNELL, WILLIAM E.
QUIJANO, NICHOLE
RAGAIN, DENNIS
RALSTON, LINDA MS [tied #10 contributor $875]
RAY, LINDA
RITTER, JOHN
ROGERS, ANN MARIE
ROGERS, LAURIE ANN
ROISEN, LOIS A. MRS.
ROTSOLK, ANTOINETTE
SATTER, ROY
SCHAEFER, ROGER J MR.
SKOROHODOV, LADONNA
SPAFFORD, SHARON
STANLEY, DEBRA
STUBBS, RODNEY
TOVAR, RICH
TRAN, TUE T [#4 contributor $1,546]
VANDERHOEK, SUSAN
WEBB, THOMAS L [#8 contributor $1,125]
WHITE-THORUD, SUSANNE
WILLIAMSON, JANICE R. MRS.
WIX, CAROL M. MS. [tied #10 contributor $875]
WOOD, LOU WILMA 

Scariest thing about Trump: trashing objective reality

Every day Donald Trump does something that irritates me. But there's One Big Thing at the heart of Trumpism that worries me the most, because there's a danger it will live on after, hopefully, Trump departs the White House in January 2021.

Denigrating objective reality to such a degree, people aren't able to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

There are lots of signs of this happening to a scarily great extent. Here's some of them.

-- Trump decrying "fake news!" at every opportunity, even though the mainstream media is hugely more truthful than the lies that constantly spew from Trump's lips.

-- The Trump administration censoring and silencing scientists, especially when it comes to research involving the environment and climate change. 

-- Trump's demagoguery where he responds to valid attacks on his character by spewing venomous epithets at those who dare to criticize him. Here's a screenshot from my iPhone today that illustrates this. (Bottom tweet came first, then the one above.)

-- Trump's shameless self-promotion where he tries to make everything about him, thereby doing his best to relegate the most important aspects of reality to the background, while he preens and prances in the foreground. Here's an example from the recent mass killing in El Paso. His smiling thumbs-up speaks wordless volumes about Trump's depravity.

A recent opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post added to my worries about objective reality being cast aside -- "I understand the temptation to dismiss QAnon. Here's why we can't." 

I'd been figuring that, as Wikipedia says, QAnon was just a wacky offshoot of the insane Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed a pizzeria was the headquarters of a child trafficking ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta. 

But Rosenberg discusses in a fascinating fashion how deep the tendrils of the QAnon mentality are reaching into certain gullible sectors of the American citizenry. Excerpts:

President Trump and his allies, including former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, are waging a covert campaign to root out an elite child-sex-trafficking ring. Mass arrests are imminent. John F. Kennedy Jr. is about to reveal that he has been alive all along so he can take Vice President Pence’s place on the 2020 Republican presidential ticket. And a mysterious government official using the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” is recruiting soldiers to the cause.

To most of us, these statements are almost too bizarre to be fathomed. But, for believers in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which the FBI recently identified as a domestic terrorist threat, they are important truths. I understand the temptation to dismiss anyone who believes in this wild concoction as merely easily misled.

Such disdain makes it easier to believe that QAnon and beliefs like it remain at the fringes of American life. But to focus merely on QAnon’s content and not the form it takes is to miss why the conspiracy theory has spread so widely — and why similar ideas may prove incredibly difficult to combat.

The best way to think of QAnon may be not as a conspiracy theory, but as an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game with extremely low barriers to entry. The “Q” poster’s cryptic missives give believers a task to complete on a semiregular basis. Even more so than conventional video games such as “Fortnite Battle Royale,” which rolls out new seasons with new scenarios roughly every 10 weeks, QAnon is open-ended — or it will be as long as the revelations continue.

...Once a person has started consuming QAnon content, the actual gameplay is relatively simple. Participants concoct their own interpretations of Q’s gnostic “bread crumbs,” or share those dreamed up by others.

If this were a conventional game, the play might end there. But QAnon players have shown an increasing tendency to enlist the rest of us as unwilling participants in their fantasies, sometimes with violent consequences.

...While most QAnon believers will never engage in violence, part of the appeal of QAnon for participants is that the conspiracy theory assigns enormous significance to even relatively minor acts such as posting on message boards or sharing Facebook posts.

...“It is addictive in the same way that a game is,” says Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon. By contrast, “conventional political participation” is oriented toward far more mundane processes, and “That all has the impact of what, hopefully getting a state assembly member elected that you feel at best ambivalent about?”

View suggests that “Q offers something a hell of a lot more. You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations.”

...It’s one thing to try to debunk QAnon and white-supremacist ideas, whether by trying to prove that John F. Kennedy Jr. is definitively dead or to combat demographic narratives of “replacement.” It’s quite another to figure out how to offer adherents of QAnon and other distorted worldviews experiences that will be as thrilling and fulfilling as conspiracy games have become.

As View put it, we’re living not in a marketplace of ideas but in a “marketplace of realities.” And the tools of gaming have given disaffected people the ability to bend our reality to theirs, whether we like it or not.

A marketplace of realities. Great way to put it. 

Like many progressives, I look back with a strange fondness upon the presidential days of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. 

I disagreed with most of their policies, but at least our disagreements occurred in the same reality. Sure, they fudged the truth from time to time. Every president does.

However, in comparison to our current Reality Denier In Chief, these old style Republicans now seem appealingly reasonable. By  and large, these conservatives embraced the same facts as their liberal opponents. So policy discussions occurred in the same reality, which is essential for productive debates.,

Trump, on the other hand, views everything through a political lens. He doesn't want intelligence officials to tell him what is actually going on in the world. He wants them to tell him what he desires to hear, a very dangerous presidential proclivity.

We're in a constitutional crisis. Yet Dems shouldn't impeach.

A little while ago I watched the House Judiciary Committee vote to hold the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, in contempt of Congress. This is only the second time in our nation's history that an A.G. has gotten a contempt citation.

It's a big deal. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the chair of the committee, just told reporters that we're now in a constitutional crisis. 

The Trump administration is refusing to honor every subpoena Congress issues. The Trump administration refuses to allow Robert Mueller to testify about the report he issued into Russian interference with the 2016 election, how Trump officials interacted with that Russian effort, and Trump's efforts to obstruct the Mueller investigation. The Trump administration has declared that the entire Mueller Report is subject to executive privilege, which is legal bullshit. 

So this has gone way beyond the usual fights between the Executive and Legislative branches of government. Trump and his cronies are refusing to recognize Congress as a co-equal branch within our republic. 

Plenty of people, including Nadler, if I recall his news conference correctly, are saying that we're well on the way to becoming a banana republic ruled by a strong man who refuses to abide by long-established norms of presidential behavior.

Problem is, our system of government is largely based on those norms.

Sure, laws and the Constitution are important. But equally important has been unwritten norms such as: the president speaks  truthfully most of the time; Congressional oversight isn't stonewalled; a free press is encouraged, not disparaged; subpoenas from Congress are taken seriously, not rejected entirely.

Impeachment is the strongest weapon Congress has to constrain abuses of presidential power.

Yet it is clear that Senate Republicans would never vote in favor of an impeachment resolution sent over by the House. Further, impeachment isn't favored by most Americans, though beginning impeachment-related investigtions is more popular.

Why attempt to impeach, though, when impeachment would never happen? I realize the emotional appeal of impeachment. What Trump is doing is beyond bad. It is despicable. All presidents behave badly at times. Trump is the first president who truly is acting like a wanna-be dictator.

The courts are another check on presidential power.

However, lawsuits by Congress and others likely would take many months, if not years, to be settled. And even if a favorable court decision happened earlier, who is going to make the Trump administration act in accord with it?

Attorney General Barr has sacrificed himself onto the altar of Full-Out Trumpian Acquiescence, like so many other Republicans.

When the head of the Justice Department isn't interested in pursuing even-handed justice, but acts like the president's personal attorney, and the Supreme Court seems to be firmly in Trump's camp, it's hard to be optimistic about the American legal system being a serious check on Trump's dictatorial ambitions.

This is why my reasonable side says focus on the 2020 election, while my emotional side says impeach the S.O.B.

Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, had some provocative tweets today that resonated with me. They were in response to someone who argued that Nancy Pelosi isn't being a bold enough leader. 

FiveThirtyEight staff engaged in an interesting chat today on the subject of "Nancy Pelosi is Going After Barr and Rejecting Impeachment. Is That a Smart Plan?" There were good arguments on both sides. Here's the final chat comment.

The big issue, I think, is that the House Democrats have to decide what they’re going to do about their relative lack of power, compared to the executive branch, and they may have to do that sooner rather than later. Pelosi can try to continue to stake out a middle ground, but they are running up against some big structural limitations — and I agree that impeachment lite is not a workable strategy in the long term.

It seems like the central challenge for Democrats is: Can you run on normalcy and basically treat Trump as an aberration? Or do you have to deal with the structural problems his presidency is exposing? The latter, of course, is incredibly hard to do.

By "impeachment lite," I believe this person meant that Democrats do as much investigating into wrongdoing by Trump as possible, but hold off on actually trying to impeach him. The obvious problem with this is that the more wrongdoing that's discovered, the harder it becomes to ignore it -- and accompanying calls from the Democratic base to impeach Trump.

Here's the way I see things. 

I ask myself a couple of questions: (1) What if the Dems attempt to impeach Trump and he wins re-election in 2020? Would I be happy? Answer is NO. I don't want Trump impeached. I want him out of office ASAP. (2) What if the Dems don't try to impeach Trump and he loses re-election in 2020? Would I be happy? YES.  Deliriously.

This shows that, along with most Democrats and a large share of independents, what I most care about is Trump being kicked out off office in the 2020 election. Impeachment is secondary. If it helps accomplish a Trump defeat, great. If it doesn't, not great.

Another way of putting it is, what's the core problem facing our country?

I'm optimistic enough to say that it really is Donald Trump, not a desire among Republicans and Trump voters to refashion our constitutional democracy into a banana republic ruled by a succession of strong men (and maybe women).

So in line with the FiveThirtyEight quote above, I'm inclined to view Trump as an aberration. A dangerous aberration, yes. An aberration who has to be fought mightily, yes. But an aberration that can be out of office in January 2021 if Democrats play their cards right between now and the 2020 election.

Impeachment proceedings would suck all of the air out of the news cycle.

Even if Democrats want to talk about Trump's latest attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, further enrich the already wealthy, engage in unneeded trade wars, screw up our relationships with long-time allies, promote hateful immigration policies, ignore the dangers of climate change, and such, impeachment will be front and center in voters' minds until the Senate votes to absolve Trump.

Which will lead Trump to scream another witch hunt at the top of his lungs just before the 2020 election, most likely.

Instead, I favor the Democrats saying, "We're not going to impeach Donald Trump in Congress. Instead, the voters are going to have the opportunity to remove him from office in November 2020. Yes, we believe he has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors. We just want you, the American public, to make the decision to deny him a second term."

Here's the most shocking thing Barr said today

If you like the prospect of the United States becoming a banana republic dictatorship where the rule of law doesn't apply to the Supreme Leader, you'll applaud Attorney General William Barr's trumpian display of arrogance, bad faith, and misleading testimony today at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

But being part of the majority of Americans who want our democracy to remain intact, I found one statement by Barr rose to the top of the OMG! I can't believe the head of the Justice Department just said that! pile, which was teetering precariously by the end of the hearing, the crap Barr said being so voluminous.

Here it is, highlighted in a Slate piece, "William Barr thinks Donald Trump is above the law."

Then, in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein about why it was that Trump ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to end the Mueller probe, Barr seems to have again taken the legal position that the president’s anger and frustration over press reports that he had instructed McGahn to fire Mueller somehow made this directive permissible.

Barr seemed to be saying that Trump could not have committed obstruction by asking McGahn to fire Mueller, so long as he was attempting to forestall further negative press. As Barr put it:

If the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false, and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel.

This is an astonishing claim—that if the president feels that the investigation is unnecessary and is resulting in him being harassed or misrepresented in the media, then the president is justified in taking any action he sees fit to stop it without running afoul of the obstruction laws.

It’s also a claim that was refuted in the Mueller report itself. It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified.

So Barr's right-wing-wacko legal theory is that if President Trump feels he's been falsely accused of something, he can fire those who are investigating the possible wrongdoing without fear of being guilty of obstruction of justice.

This is the dream of every criminal -- to be able to get rid of the police, prosecutors, judge, jury, and anyone else who threatens to bring them to justice.

Your honor, it is my distinct pleasure to inform you that your services are no longer needed in this case, along with the jury, district attorney, and all of the witnesses. In accord with the view of the Attorney General of the United States, I feel that I've been falsely accused and I don't like how newspapers have been covering my trial. So I'm ending this farce.

Before I heard Barr say what he did today, I would have thought it impossible that the Attorney General would hold that if a president thinks he is being falsely accused, he can fire those investigating the accusation with no fear of punishment.

But Barr said exactly that. Which is why I consider this to be the most shocking thing William Barr said today. Unfortunately, tomorrow is another day.